It was the ball of the day. The classic beating in the flight on unhelpful surfaces. When you show them the flat trajectory, sending them back immediately, but bowling full and getting just enough turn to go past the bat. Keshara Nuwantha's length had, for a change, made Devdutt Padikkal play for what has emerged as the biggest strength of his game. In scoring two centuries in two Tests, playing a lot of spin bowling, Padikkal's standout quality has been the ability to use the depth of the crease and manufacture scoring opportunities against good balls.
That is what makes Test batters. You can afford to wait to score off bad balls in lower levels of cricket. In Tests, you rarely get bad balls. You have to be good enough to score off good balls. It involves some form of risk but you become so good at that shot that you tilt the odds in your favour. Going back to spin and cutting, punching and pulling spinners' good length is what gets Padikkal his runs.
In his 117 at SSC in the second Test, Padikkal scored 52 runs off the back foot against spin. A staggering 47 of those came off good lengths according to Cricinfo's logs. He went back to 59 good-length balls he faced from the spinners.
Padikkal has the ability to generate power from the back foot, and he can play a variety of shots: the regulation, the late cut, the cut in front of square, the pull both square and in front of square, and the punch. Sometimes just the width is enough.
In Colombo, Shubman Gill had started more fluently than Padikkal, but when Sri Lanka tried to stall the game by bowling outside leg to both the batters, Gill lost all the flow and kept padding the ball but Padikkal went past him by using his foot to cut these balls, some from in front of the stumps.
It is an unfair comparison to make with India's incumbent No. 3, but one that is also natural because B Sai Sudharsan also likes to stay back to spin. It is unfair of course because Sai Sudharsan has played on tougher tracks in India and against higher quality of bowlers. Still, for what it is worth, in their young careers, Padikkal and Sudharsan have gone back to good length from the spinners 52% and 60% of the time, according to Cricinfo logs. It's what happens when they go back that diverges: with the caveat of conditions and quality, Sudharsan strikes at 36 per 100 times of going back to length balls from spinners; Padikkal 61.
It would appear that Padikkal is a more dynamic batter, not just off the back foot but also able to use his reach better, as he did in the first Test to unsettle Prabath Jayasuriya out of the gate. This ability seems to sit well with India's team management.
"For me the intent he has shown, the temperament he has shown, and with the pace he batted as well…" India's batting coach Sitanshu Kotak said. "He batted with a very good strike rate as well. The way he batted is a really really good sign for us. He has been waiting for his turn for the last year and a half. Maybe two years. I am so happy that the way he prepared… that he got his opportunity."
Padikkal vs Sai Sudharsan is not a comparison that Kotak wanted to be drawn into. "He batted really well," Kotak said when asked if India had found their long-term No. 3 in Padikkal. "But I feel even Sai Sudharsan batted really well. He got out on 90 or something like that. Devdutt obviously converted it into hundreds. They are both new batters, they bat well, they can open also, they can go at 3 also. The way Devdutt bats, he can bat 5 also. It is not… it is more promising for us the way he approached the game and he delivered. That is a big positive."
It is highly unlikely that Padikkal will lose his No. 3 slot now after these two centuries, especially when Sai Sudharsan was a bit of an experiment, the first specialist batter to debut for India with a first-class average under 40 since WV Raman back in 1988. Whether they keep Sai Sudharsan around with the squad or ask him to score runs in domestic cricket in order to make a comeback, if Padikkal can keep creating scoring opportunities off good balls from spinners, it will be a big positive for them in next year's Border-Gavaskar Trophy.